Refractory Metals and Advanced Coatings for Radiatively Cooled RDREs

The development of combustion chambers and nozzles for a Rotating Detonation Rocket Engine (RDRE) is currently a difficult endeavor. Some factors contributing to this difficulty are the analytical determination of heat fluxes, limited survivability of existing materials in the environment of an RDRE, and the design complexity of regenerative cooling necessitated by the materials limits. The team of Agile Space Industries and MIT plan to holistically address these challenges during the Phase I effort, where RDRE thermal analysis codes developed at MIT will be adopted by the Agile Space Industries team. These codes will inform the design of a combustion chamber and nozzle for an RDRE injector already designed by UCLA with assistance from The Aerospace Corporation who will be subcontractors to the effort. To eliminate the need for regenerative cooling, the Agile Space Industries team will demonstrate the suitability of higher temperature refractory metal alloy for the metal laser powder bed fusion (LB-PBF) additive manufacturing process. This effort will yield the design of an RDRE manufactured using Niobium C129Y, establishing the basis for continued full-scale product development during a Phase II.

The proposed innovation for high temperature materials will support propulsion manufacturing for future NASA RDREs, other rocket engines, and other high-temperature aerospace structures. The advent of additively manufactured high temp materials, like the proposed innovation of Niobium C129Y, could support the rapid and low-cost manufacturing of propulsion components within RDREs. Subsequently, the high performance offered by RDREs will impact NASA future mission sets through increased satellite mission life, higher payload masses to orbit, and an overall reduction in NASA mission costs. The innovation of additively manufactured C129Y can be used to manufacture a variety of rocket engine components for commercial space and national security applications. C129Y may offer dual-use applications to the manufacturing of other high-temperature aerospace structures including hypersonic structures, propulsion support structures, or other components. AGILE plans to infuse C129Y into their commercial propulsion products to increase the efficiency and open the design space for commercial space propulsion technologies.

This is early/mid-stage (TRL 2) — the most realistic path in is NASA SBIR/STTR, which funds small businesses and research institutions to develop technology aligned with NASA's needs (equity-free, phased funding). Check whether a current SBIR/STTR solicitation topic overlaps with this project's technology area, or contact the project directly (above) to ask.

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